The missing men of the American marriage market

Actress Scarlett Johansson with boyfriend Jack Antonoff at the BCBG Spring 2003 fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City. September 19, 2002. Photo by Evan Agostini/ImageDirect Evan Agostini/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Evan Agostini/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

"You're a genius," joked Stern. "You picked a high school where everyone was gay — so you get Scarlett Johansson."

It may have been a joke, but it actually points to a broader phenomenon that can affect whole societies. Economists and other social scientists have long studied how gender imbalances can dramatically reshape dating and marriage markets, which can help the romantic prospects of some while hurting the prospects of others.

A lot of these studies involve bleak, depressing stuff. For example, a large body of research looks at gender imbalances after wars, when societies lose large numbers of young men.

One influential study looked at what happened in France after much of the male population was killed during World War I. The authors found that the men who remained in France tended to "marry up," pairing with women from higher social classes "that would have been inaccessible before the war." In a sense, the value of French men in the marriage market seems to have increased because men were in short supply.

Modern China presents a kind of mirror image to post-WWI France. For decades, men have substantially outnumbered women in China. That's in large part because in 1979, the Communist government launched the One Child Policy, which limited couples to having one kid. Influenced by traditional preferences for boys, and concerned about the economic prospects of their families, many couples sought to make sure their one kid was a boy rather than a girl. China has since ended the One Child Policy, but it contributed to a large surplus of men relative to women. Research has suggested that women in modern China have leveraged their relative scarcity, becoming more likely to marry up.

The United States is not currently witnessing any demographic imbalances so extreme. The ratio of men to women is pretty even. However, the economic and educational trajectories of men and women have increasingly diverged, with a large swath of men falling behind.

For example, women are now more likely to graduate from college than men. In recent years, female students have made up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students, and outnumbered men on college campuses by more than two million, according to one government estimate. Meanwhile, many men who didn't get a college education have been struggling economically, and have been much more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and unemployed.

A new working paper by economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates," looks at how this growing educational and economic gender imbalance is affecting marriage patterns in the United States.

The study suggests that the struggles of many American men have created something like a game of musical chairs for women looking to get married. College-educated women have largely maintained high marriage rates, but they've done so by increasingly getting hitched to men without a college education. But they're not ending up with just any men in this demographic pool. They're, on average, partnering up with the higher-earning ones.

Meanwhile, this study suggests that women without a college education are left with a shrinking pool of economically stable husbands. They're still having kids, but their marriage rate has plummeted, and many are raising their kids by themselves.

Scholars have referred to the demographic imbalance in China as "missing women." One way to interpret these findings is that America increasingly has what you might call "missing economically stable men." It may help explain the dramatic rise of single-mother households, and it could be one driver of worsening inequality in America.

A transformation in the American marriage market

As The Beatles once sang, money can't buy me love. And neither can a diploma.And before we get into matters of income and education affecting marriage rates, it's worth saying that people marry for lots of other reasons: attraction, chemistry, humor, kindness, ambition, shared values — all sorts of things economists struggle to quantify.

Still, a vast social science literature highlights the reality that people tend to marry people from similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds.

"Folks tend to marry people who look like them," says Clara Chambers, a research fellow at Yale University who co-authored this study (and will begin a PhD in economics at Harvard this fall).

Economists refer to this as "assortative mating," and they've found it's one important driver of growing inequality. Educated people with high earning potential tend to get hitched to other educated people with high earning potential, and it's like two jet boosters powering some American households higher in the income distribution.

But for college-educated women hoping to pair off with similarly educated, high-earning men, demographic trends have increasingly made that more difficult, with women now substantially outnumbering men on college campuses.

"And so if you're a woman and you have a four-year degree, today there's just fewer men relative to the number of women with four-year degrees," Chambers says.

Chambers grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, which has become something of a poster-child of the ills of deindustrialization. She says a lot of her friends in high school were raised by single mothers. "And, anecdotally,  I saw a lot of my female friends went to college, and a lot of my male friends didn't."

In her new study, Chambers and her coauthors look at marriage rates of Americans born between 1930 and 1980 — basically covering the Greatest Generation through Gen X.

The economists find that for college-educated women, the marriage rate has actually declined only modestly. "Among those born in 1930, 77.7% were married at age 45, compared to 71.0% for the 1980 cohort."

In contrast, the marriage rate for women who didn't go to college fell off a cliff. For those born in 1930, about 78.7% of non-college-educated women were married at age 45, slightly higher than among college-educated women. Now the two groups look wildly different. For those women born in 1980, only about 52.4% of them were married at 45.

" The decline in marriage rates that we've seen in America is really concentrated among Americans who aren't going to college," Chambers says about this data.

How college-educated women are maintaining higher marriage rates

One puzzle in the data was that college-educated women were still getting married at relatively high rates, despite the shrinking pool of college-educated men.

The economists had two theories about this: one was that college-educated women dramatically increased the rate at which they were marrying college-educated men. The other was that they increasingly married men without four-year degrees.

"And when we looked into it, we found it's really the second explanation: college-educated women are substituting towards marrying men without four-year degrees," Chambers says.

As a whole, non-college-educated men have struggled economically in recent decades. But, of course, not all men without a college degree are the same. Many are doing well for themselves as, for example, small business owners, mechanics, contractors, electricians, plumbers, pilots, HVAC technicians, and, sometimes, musicians (including Jack Antonoff, who never graduated college). The economists find that college-educated women are, on average, hitching up with this top-earning tier of non-college-educated men.

"And what's left is a pool of non-college-educated men who are really struggling," Chambers says. "And that makes up the market of available men for non-college-educated women, which we think might be why they've seen such steep declines in marriage rates over this period."

This study adds to a growing body of research that finds that the economic difficulties facing working-class Americans are bleeding into the most intimate parts of their social life. Much of the conversation has focused on working-class men themselves, and how that has been reflected in their own social struggles. This paper shifts attention to how those struggles may be affecting women and kids.

On the one hand, you could argue, if women and men don't want to get married, that's fine. Many women are choosing to delay marriage or skip it altogether, including a growing number of financially secure women pursuing parenthood on their own through IVF and other means.

Yet, this research suggests that for many working-class Americans, declining marriages may reflect not just changing preferences, but also declining economic stability — particularly among men without college degrees. Women without college degrees are still having children at relatively high rates — but they're increasingly doing so without partners able to reliably contribute income, time, or support. Kids raised by single mothers are, on average, at higher risk of poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and a range of other hardships.

Something seems to have broken down in the American marriage market. This study suggests that an important part of the story is a shrinking supply of economically stable men available for many working-class women.

If that's true, then, Chamber suggests, policies that build a better economy and help Americans excel in school, avoid prison, and find stable work could be reflected in higher marriage rates.

"I think there are ways to help these men that are struggling that we expect might have downstream effects on marriage rates," Chambers says.